Children giving hope for a greener tomorrow
(Alexander Wan and Selina Lo)

Global warming, the exhausting of energy reserves and water supplies, pollution, insufficient land to support a growing population, abject poverty and uneven distribution of resources were identified as the world's major problems by delegates at China Daily's 21st CEO Roundtable.

The event, with the theme of "Sustainable Development in China" and chaired by Dr Jane Goodall was held on December 6 at the Grand Hyatt hotel in Beijing. Goodall, world-renowned chimpanzee expert and UN Messenger for Peace, met with some thirty CEOs and leaders from multinational companies in major business sectors such as energy, petro-chemicals, technology, cars, finance, strategy consulting, healthcare, NGOs and a special delegation from the Harvard School of Public Health.

"Other countries have been through the same kind of problems that China is facing today," said Goodall, citing examples in the UK and US." China is so big and there are so many people so inevitably, environmental and other problems are going to be harder to tackle."

Two approaches

"For the model of sustainable development to be really sustainable, you need two approaches: top-down and bottom-up," said Professor Liu Yuanli, director of the China Initiative in the Department of Population and International Health of the Harvard School of Public Health.

"Leadership is needed at the planning and policy level," Liu added.He illustrated this with a story of how county government leadership in Hubei curbed deforestation by introducing methane as a cooking fuel to replace firewood, which stopped inhabitants from cutting down trees.

The role of the government

Executive Editor of the China Daily CEO Roundtable, Alexander Wan, pointed out that the Chinese government is already working on sustainable development.

"In China's 11th Five-Year Plan which is coming up in the country in a few weeks," Wan reminded delegates,"there will be a continual emphasis from top state leadership on the development of a harmonious society, which is very relevant to what we are talking about here today. It is very much about applying scientific approaches to make use of natural and human resources for the long-term benefit of all people."

David Michael, director and senior vice-president of the Boston Consulting Group, agreed.

"Clearly, the Chinese Government is increasingly taking the issue that you highlighted very seriously," he said.

But he added that even the government is not omnipotent in the face of such grave environmental issues.

"I think the experience in other countries would be that governments cannot do all of this by themselves," says Michael."And in other countries, there's more of a tradition of support from non-governmental organizations and also from domestic companies. In China, there's not such a history of non-governmental organizations, and many domestic companies are too new to have developed experience in social responsibility."